Comedian John Fugelsang on government prayer: ‘Scalia law is a lot like Sharia law’

Comedian John Fugelsang pointed out on Tuesday that a recent Supreme Court decision allowing Christian prayers by government bodies was making Justice Antonin Scalia’s version of U.S. law look “a lot like Sharia law.”

On the Tuesday edition of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz noted that Raw Story had recently reported that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore had said that the U.S. Constitution only applied to Christians, and Rep. Louie Gohmert asserted that it only protected people who “cling to their God and their guns.”

Americans United Executive Director Rev. Barry Lynn told Schultz that he was disappointed that the Obama administration had backed government prayer based on the reasoning that Congress could be stopped from praying publicly each day.

“Do you think that President Obama thinks that the fact that John Boehner has a prayer before the House of Representatives every morning has led to good positive legislation?” he wondered. “I mean, that’s absolutely silly. And the explanation from Judge Moore — you could put monkeys into rooms with a couple of typewriters and they could have come up with a more sensible, comprehensible statement than what Judge Moore did to kind of back peddle his way out of that statement from last week.”

Fugelsang argued that the Supreme Court ruling, and the opinions of Moore and Gohmert were really about “Christian supremacy,” not true Christianity.

“Jesus says you take care of the poor, you take care of the less fortunate,” Fugelsang explained. “This is about a whole different thing: establishing Christianity as the dominant religion. If Jesus came back, he wouldn’t sue to make his name be said in Caesar’s house because Jesus wasn’t about asserting personal power.”

“And the irony is, these are the guys that are praying for a separation of mosque and state over there, erasing the wall of church and state over here,” he added. “And it’s interesting, with government in religion, Scalia law is a lot like Sharia law.”

Watch the video below from MSNBC’s The Ed Show, broadcast May 7, 2014.

About the Author

David Edwards has served as an editor at Raw Story since 2006. His work can also be found at Crooks & Liars, and he's also been published at The BRAD BLOG. He came to Raw Story after working as a network manager for the state of North Carolina and as as engineer developing enterprise resource planning software. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidEdwards.